Time and Again (9 page)

6

I shaved for the last time on Sunday. On Monday morning, ten dummies covered by sheets stood in a row across the front of the classroom Danziger had told me to report to. I walked along the row looking them over, wanting to lift one of the sheets and peek. But before I could work up the nerve, a skinny young man of about twenty-six, I thought, came hurrying in, and introduced himself. This was Martin Lastvogel, my instructor, and we shook hands and agreed it would be sensible to use first names. I sat down in a one-armed classroom chair and watched him standing behind the desk hunting through a worn-out briefcase; the straps were curled from years of use, and below the lock was the remnant of a round paper sticker that had once read
Columbia U.

My God, he's homely,
I thought. He didn't have quite enough chin to balance his nose, which was big, sharp and too long; his hair was also too long by about three weeks and hadn't been combed for four. But when he glanced up and smiled, his eyes were friendly, eager with intelligence, and I found out later that he had a marvelous-looking wife who thought he was a wonder, and that Martin was forty-one years old.

"Okay," he said; he'd found what he was looking for, a packet of file-card notes which he riffled affectionately with a thumb, then set neatly on a corner of the desk top. "I'm not really a teacher, so just speak up whenever I'm not clear or make no sense. I'm a researcher, one of the lucky people who can earn a living doing what they like to do, in my case historical research. Ask me how streets were lighted, if at all, in fourteenth-century Paris, or what an eighteenth-century peruke was made of, or how they wrapped lard in a New England butchershop in 1926. And I'll poke around in the debris of the past, and try to find out for you. Over the weekend I've been digging into the eighties, and I'll be doing a great deal more. It's a terribly neglected period, though I don't know why because a great deal of interest seems to have been going on then.

"But I'm not here just to stuff you with facts about the period. You get along in the twentieth century without knowing everything about it." Martin walked out from behind the desk to stand beside the nearest figure; he took hold of the sheet. "And I don't think you have to know all about the eighties either. But you
do
have to
feel
them." He pulled the sheet from the figure.

There hung an old dress. It was a drab drooping tube of some heavy dark material, and I got to my feet and walked up to take a look. It hung motionless on the dummy, its hem touching the floor, the long full sleeves limp and straight at the sides. The neck was high, and an intricate pattern of tiny dull black beads lay across the chest and encircled the cuffs. Martin said, "We borrowed this from the Smithsonian. For your benefit. Flew it up here. It was made and worn in the early eighties. People walk through the Smithsonian, look at things like this, and think this is how women dressed." He began shaking his head. "But it's not. Get it through your head that it's not. Look at the color! If you can still call it a color. The old dyes don't hold up, Si!" he said as though I'd been arguing that they did. "For decades that thing has been fading, altering; into no color at all, finally. And look at the cloth. Shriveled. Shrunken in places. While in other places it sags; I think all the life has gone out of the threads. Even the bead trim has turned black!" Martin reached out and tapped my shoulder. "This is what you've got to understand, and more than that you've got to
feel
it: The women of the eighties weren't ghosts. They were
living women,
and they would never have worn that rag!" He jerked a thumb at the ancient dress. "The woman who once owned that — what did she
really
wear when she first put it on?
Here's
what she wore! To a party!"

Martin snapped the covering from the next figure, and there stood — I won't call it a dress but a
gown
of bright wine-red velvet, the nap fresh and unworn, the material magnificently draped in thick multiple folds, front and back. The bead trim caught the light, glittering a clear deep red, shimmering as though the garment were moving. It was spectacular; under the overhead lights the gown glowed like a jewel. "We chose this original" — Martin touched the sad, drab dress from the museum — "because they have a diary at the Smithsonian, donated with the dress, that records when and how it was made, including the dressmaker's pattern and an unfaded swatch of the material. We've had a replica made" — he reached out, his fingers unable to resist the rich new red velvet — "that is far more the dress a living woman once wore than what's left of the actual original." He stood peering at me anxiously, then gestured to the brand-new gown. "Can you see an actual breathing woman, Si, a
girl,
wearing this and looking absolutely great?"

And I said, "Hell, yes: I can see her dancing!"

In the next couple of hours we looked at a brown-at-the-edges cloth wreck that, unimaginably, had once actually been a child's party dress. Then we studied a duplicate in some kind of fresh flouncy pink cloth, that looked the way it did the day the girl first put it on. And I saw — as they had survived and as they had been when new — a boy's suit with brass buttons and knee pants; a postman's uniform; and a man's suit including a cutaway coat with silk-faced lapels, raveling and dusty in the original, fresh and shiny in the replica.

During that week — I couldn't keep my hands off my beginning new beard — we looked at a collection of men's and women's hats of all kinds, originals and duplicates; and of purses, muffs, gloves. And one morning I stood turning a woman's shoe in my hands, studying the brittle gray-black leather crisscrossed with cracks. The toe and a band around the top were oddly discolored, the mother-of-pearl buttons chipped; it was no longer a shoe but a curiosity. Then Martin handed me its counterpart in new leather, and it was supple in my hands, the buttons of newly cut mother-of-pearl, the toe and a wide strip around the top brilliantly scarlet. Martin was imaginative; the shoe wasn't quite new. It had the fragrance of new leather but the sole was a little scratched, the heel had lost its sharp edges, and the faint beginning of a crease lay across the shiny instep. Martin smiled and said, "The trouble with everything that comes down from the distant past is that it's old. A relic. It may tell us something of what the past was like, yet it generally contradicts any feeling that it could possibly have been used by someone really alive." He nodded at the shoe in my hands. "But that's a shoe a living person could own. We had to create it, though." I nodded; it wasn't hard to see a young girl sitting on the edge of her bed pulling this on, buttoning it, then admiring it as she revolved her foot on her ankle to make the new leather catch the light.

During several days Martin and I sat leafing through books whose pages had gone brown and whose covers were sometimes speckled with mildew. As you turned the pages, corners flaked off; only a ghost could ever have read these. Then, from a box, Martin brought out the same books, identical except that now their covers were bright new reds, blues, and greens, their titles fresh-stamped in shining gold leaf, their pages pure white, the fresh black print still smelling of ink. Obviously these had never been read — not yet. And in my mind the eighties had begun to stir a little with life.

Rube was in the cafeteria lineup one noon, and he joined Martin and me for lunch. Then, during the rest of that afternoon, he took me into every office, into the carpentry and metal work shop, a small library, the conference room, the tailor's and shoemaker's shop, the control room for the Big Floor, a tiny projection room, and into every other place in the building where people were working; and he introduced me to them all.

I met Peter Marple, a young designer for the project, formerly a set designer in the New York theater, and a good one; I'd seen several plays of his, it turned out. I met Larry McDermott, the project photographer, who'd occasionally done work for an ad agency I'd once been with. I met technicians, stenographers, engineers, an accountant. I met an associate professor of history from the University of California, and people whose work wasn't mentioned; Rube referred to one of them as "our chief briber," at which the man just grinned.

Except for the two already out on the floor — John McNaughton in the Vermont house, and George Wing, a Crow Indian and former chief petty officer who was living in the tepee I'd seen — I also met my fellow candidates. One was the man I'd seen studying medieval French; we had a mutual friend whose first name neither of us could recall. Another was Miss Eileen Jorgensen, a thin, anxious-looking young mathematics teacher from Lincoln, Nebraska, who began studying turn-of-the-century San Francisco in the classroom next to mine. And I met the good-looking Charleston girl and the man I'd watched practicing with a rubber bayonet.

In a corridor walking toward the elevator, Rube said, "We made a mistake with that pair. They started having coffee together in the cafeteria, then lunch together, then meeting outside. Now, of course, all they're interested in is each other. They'll be getting married soon, and I suppose that's great. But we're not running a lonely-hearts club, and no one gives either of them much chance of succeeding anymore. So we've locked the barn door, and now the rule is: Pass the time of day with the other candidates when you see them around, but no fraternizing; okay?"

"Sure, as long as I'm too late for the Charleston girl." We rode down in the elevator — it was ten after five — and walked across town together, stopping in at the Algonquin for a drink.

I spent an hour, one morning, in Doc Rossoff's office, while he taught me the technique of self-hypnosis. It was surprisingly easy; at least the technique was. He had me sit down in his big green-leather easy chair and get comfortable. He said, "Close your eyes if you like, though it's not necessary." I closed them. "Now, just silently tell yourself that you are becoming more and more comfortable, more and more relaxed in body and mind both. And let it become true. Then tell yourself that you are slowly, gradually, moving into trance. A light trance, fully awake and aware. Don't let the word 'trance' bother you; it's simply a convenient term for a state of somewhat advanced receptiveness to suggestion; nothing mysterious about it. Presently, when you feel you've achieved it, tell yourself in so many words that you are under self-hypnosis. Then test it: Tell yourself that you are temporarily unable to lift your arm. Try it, and if you really can't lift your arm you're in trance. Make any self-hypnotic suggestion you wish, then. If you had a headache, for example, you'd tell yourself you were going to count to five, and that your headache would have faded away before you finished. Or you can blank out thoughts, emotions, memories, and make them return later by posthypnotic suggestion. Okay? It's really a remarkable tool."

I nodded, and he left me, to try it out. I did what he'd said, and felt myself grow wonderfully relaxed and comfortable. Presently I told myself I was gradually moving into light trance, and it seemed to me I could feel it happening. Sitting there, motionless, almost drowsy, I told myself that I could not lift my arm, that it was powerless to move. Then, my eyes on my coat sleeve, I tried to lift my arm, and almost hit myself in the eye as it popped right up.

I tried again, taking more time, feeling every muscle relax; and the only part of me that didn't know I was in hypnosis was my arm; up it came every time like an eager but stupid dog who doesn't quite understand the trick. Doc came back presently, listened, and told me to practice at home, preferably when I was actually tired and sleepy.

One morning Martin Lastvogel had a screen pulled down across the blackboard at the front of the classroom, a slide projector on a stand at the back. We sat side by side, Martin with a remote-control gadget in his hand. He clicked it, the air fan of the projector started up, and a round-cornered square of white light, fuzzed at the edges, filled most of the screen. Another click, and the square turned into a sharp-focused black-and-white drawing, an old-fashioned woodcut. It was a street scene, a busy one — of the eighties, I supposed; there were carriages, wagons, pedestrians. It was well done — the artist a good draftsman — but in a style that hasn't been used for half a century. "Done directly from a photograph, very likely," Martin said quietly; unconsciously he'd dropped his voice as people do in the dark. "A lot of illustrative woodcuts were copied from photos, before photoengraving. If so, you're looking at what could be an absolutely accurate representation of an actual moment. That's what it
did
convey to someone of the time. With the help of that woodcut in his weekly picture magazine, a man of the eighties could visualize the scene."

This was my own field, and I said, "But it's not how we convey reality. Reminds me of Japanese art, the perspective flat, and even Westerners' eyes slanted. To us his drawing is unreal, but to his own audience —»

"Right. Supply your own lecture, and do me out of a job. I've got a family to support, you know. Okay; we gave a copy of that cut, and a batch of others, to Sidney Urquhart. You know him?"

"I've seen his work: street scenes, city scenes. Watercolors, mostly. He's pretty good."

"He knows how to tell you what a city is like; you think he succeeded here?" Martin clicked his control, and a Sidney Urquhart that I wanted to own filled the screen. It was the scene we'd just looked at, detail for detail. And it was also a drawing. But this was in color, the pen-and-ink outlines filled in with brushed-on india inks in strong shades. It was the same scene but impressionistic; the thing
moved.
What I'd so often tried to do staring at Katie's stereoscope views, he'd got down on paper; the carriage horses were really trotting, the dray horses beside them sweaty and straining with effort. Carriage wheels were revolving, the spokes catching the light, and a mustached man dodging through the traffic was
darting,
his feet nimble and busy; you
saw
it. As Urquhart's sketch flashed onto the screen there was an instant when I was standing on the curb watching the scene and it was almost real.